How is PLG marketing different than non PLG marketing?

There are two main ways tech companies make money:
- sales-led: a salesperson works with a customer and closes the deal (which was the norm for decades)

- self-serve: a customer can manually enter their credit-card information into the product to purchase something, bypassing a human.

Self-serve/credit-card sales is only one aspect of product-led growth (PLG), which also includes using the product to sign up customers (which humans used to own), activate them (which humans used to own), upgrade them (see above), and renew them (which humans used to own).

At its most basic level, PLG marketing is more about helping the product itself — and the humans who work on it — do the heavy lifting of attracting customers, getting them to sign up, trying various features, upgrading, and then renewing.

Sales-led marketing is more about helping your human coworkers (salespeople, customer success managers, etc.) do more of that marketing/sales/customer-success work.

A hybrid company (PLG + Sales like we have at Calendly) is about doing a mix of both.

IMO, the easiest way to separate PLG marketing from non PLG marketing is to think about the touchpoints you cover as a product marketer, as well as the audiences you address. These will differ across PLG and non PLG motions, in the following ways:

Touchpoints

• A PLG product marketer is across the different steps of a user's journey. Because growth and activation in PLG comes from offering a frictionless first-time user experience (FTUE), your role in product marketing is to "grease the skids" across the product discovery process, and make sure that the user ends up going through the different steps of that user journey as intended. For that reason, PLG PMMS should focus on working with the product management, UX/UI, and lifecycle and web marketing teams, as well as whichever team runs pricing and packaging.
  

• A non PLG product marketer, by contrast, is across the different steps of a user's buying journey. While they also need to make sure a potential user/customer has a great first impression of the product, they really optimize across the marketing funnel itself: from awareness and consideration, to evaluation, and eventually conversion. In most cases, they will support a sales-led motion, whether that's through direct sales channel for enterprise or through merchandising and placement for b2c. Non PLG product marketers typically work with sales, sales engineering, influencer relations and customer success. On the marketing side, you can expect to work more with brand, demand gen, field marketing, partner marketing.

Audience

Another way to look at the difference between PLG and Non-PLG marketing is to think about the audiences you're trying to reach.

• PLG is also known as self-serve, and in most cases that means individual consumers or smaller accounts that need your core offering and are motivated enough to swipe their credit card to acquire your solution if they deem it to be satisfactory. Your job as a marketer is to make that process sesame street simple.

• Non-PLG is typically sales-led, or channel-led. The buying decision is a little more complex and takes longer. Your audience there is typically a more sophisticated customer and larger customer (mid-market, large business and enterprise). Your job as a marketer is to take them on a consideration/evaluation journey and have them sign the dotted line at the very end of it.

Marketing fundamentals are the same whether your growth strategy is PLG or traditional outbound marketing (and the two are not exclusive!): you still need to understand your target market, develop effective messaging, and get in front of the right people at the right moment. At SurveyMonkey, we engage in both PLG and traditional marketing as part of our overall GTM strategy.

With PLG, we are thinking strategically about how the product itself can act as a channel for delivering our message, convincing customers, and driving product virality. Using SurveyMonkey as an example:

• When somebody sends a survey, we can grow awareness with brand impressions made through email invitations, on survey pages, and even through the content we decide to display after a survey is taken

• A freemium, self-serve pricing model and try-before-you-buy tactics help grow acquisition

• Customers who want to leverage their own brand, instead of ours, can upgrade to a paid product directly through product-driven purchase flows — one of many levers that can drive paid conversion

• Strategic feature investments, like in-product collaboration, paired with good promotion at the right moment, increase engagement and ultimately drive expansion and retention outcomes

Lastly, consider how PLG and traditional marketing channels can be used together to increase effectiveness, and make sure that both product and marketing teams have access to key signals about user behavior so that you can reach them with consistent messaging across all of the channels available to you. For example, if someone hits a paywall in your product but doesn't convert in-the-moment, traditional marketing channels can take over to reinforce your message / convince even after they've left your website or app.

To simplify, PLG (Product-Led Growth) focuses on self-service, where marketing and product efforts enable customers to explore, understand, and adopt the product independently, without direct human interaction. This approach demands:

1. Market Awareness: Making potential users aware of the product.

2. Education: Clearly explain the product's value and operation.

3. Onboarding: Guiding users to start using the product smoothly.

4. Activation: Encouraging users to engage with the product actively.

5. Adoption: Supporting users in fully integrating the product into their routines.

Key elements such as the website, content, and product itself must be highly effective to ensure a seamless user experience. From a marketing standpoint, understanding the audience and customer journey stages is crucial to delivering the right content at the right time.

Conversely, a sales-driven approach involves collaborating with sales enablement to provide content that supports the sales process. In contrast, PLG emphasizes Buyer Enablement, focusing on aiding the buyer's journey. This means offering the tools and information needed for the buyer to make an informed decision and proceed through the purchase process on their own.